The individual's right
Under GDPR, people can ask for a copy of the personal data they provided in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format such as CSV or JSON. Where practical, they can also ask you to send it directly to another service.
The right applies to data the person supplied and that you process by consent or contract, using automated means. Being able to answer such a request cleanly is part of good compliance.
Why it matters beyond the law
The same principle protects your business. If your customer, booking, or content data is trapped in a tool you cannot export from, you are locked in and at the mercy of that vendor's pricing and roadmap.
Designing for portability keeps you free to move. Clean exports and open formats mean you can switch tools, run backups, or migrate to a new system without a painful, lossy extraction.
How we build for it
We favour systems with clean export paths and open data formats, and we keep data models tidy enough that a full extract is straightforward rather than a project in itself.
That approach makes responding to a portability request routine, and it means your data stays yours, ready to move whenever your needs change. Our software builds treat exportability as a baseline requirement.